The use of ICT's for teaching and learning
The use of ICT for Teaching/Learning, Administration and Management: An overview of good practices.
Recent work at infoDev created a series of Knowledge Maps of what is known and what isn't about ICT use in education. These knowledge maps reveal that, despite a decade of large investment in ICTs to benefit education in OECD countries, and increasing use of ICTs in education in developing countries, important gaps remain in the current knowledge base. In addition, there appears to be a dearth of useful resources attempting to translate what is known to work; and not work; in this field for policymakers and donor staff working on education issues in developing countries, especially those issues related to Education For All and other education-related Millennium Development Goals.
"Mr. Su believes that better teacher training is needed, so that new teachers have a better comfort level with new technologies.
“Teachers’ colleges should really be on the forefront,” he said. “They should have a compulsory course on using technology in the classroom"
This special report features a series of columns by Dr. Lawrence C. Ragan, Director of Instructional Design and Development for Penn State’s World Campus, and will help you establish online instructor best practices and performance expectations. The following snippets are just a taste of the insider’s advice found in the full report:
Principles of Effective Online Teaching: #1 Show Up and Teach — The necessity of this statement is borne of the misimpression that the online class “teaches itself.” Since most of the course is already authored and designed for online delivery, instructors may believe they simply need to serve as the proverbial “guide on the side” as the students navigate the learning system. Not true!
Principles of Effective Online Teaching: #2 Practice Proactive Course Management Strategies — The online instructor can help create a successful learning experience by practicing proactive course management strategies such as monitoring assignment submissions, and communicating and reminding students of missed and/or upcoming deadlines.
Principles of Effective Online Teaching: #3 Establish Patterns of Course Activities — Although the online classroom environment provides tremendous flexibility of time and place of study, establishing and communicating a course pace and pattern of work can aid both instructor and student, and alleviate confusion around how the course operates.
Principles of Effective Online Teaching: #4 Plan for the Unplanned — For those small or not-so-small occasions when “life happens,” having a strategy for informing students of these changes can go a long way to maintaining course continuity.
Principles of Effective Online Teaching: #5 Response Requested and Expected — Timely instructor feedback is essential for the online learner to manage their learning experience. Instructors are expected to respond to student inquiries within one business day.
Frameworks
Some articles to help us focus on the importance of a framework, what should go into creating a framework that works for our context and looking at some existing frameworks
" This collaboration space is designed to host the UNESCO project on "ICT Competency Standards for Teachers" (ICT-CST). The core objective here is to share the various documents constituting the "standards", in many languages, and to exchange views regarding the evolving ICT competencies' benchmarks.
The "implementation guidelines" (Syllabus) part of the standards will evolve in response to technology evolutions and we hope to use the feedback received from this site to produce the future updates for the "syllabus". "
The ICTeTD Model is grounded in the belief that teaching has its own unique knowledge base, which, in the 21st century, is the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK). While it is not unusual now to find ICT courses in teacher education programs in Africa, ICTeTD is grounded in IICBA’s strong belief that professional teacher development should not only go beyond programs that merely focus on training teachers in the operation of computers and ICT literacy per se, but should plan to work actively towards enabling African teachers to master ICT as an effective tool to improve teaching and learning.
“So that we’re all on the same page, let’s agree—at least for the duration of this article—on this definition of “framework”: a set of tools, libraries, conventions, and best practices that attempt to abstract routine tasks into generic modules that can be reused. The goal here is to allow the designer or developer to focus on tasks that are unique to a given project, rather than reinventing the wheel each time around. Generally speaking, this is the approach taken by the aforementioned JavaScript and web application frameworks.”
OER resources
More information about OER
Lots of great resources here that are free to use.
Case studies
Some of the case study resource material and some additional case studies that might be of interest for teacher education.
Professional development 4 teachers courses and tutorials
A collection of free, open and paid for courses and PD for teachers
ISTE's NETS for Teachers (NETS•T) are the standards for evaluating the skills and knowledge educators need to teach, work, and learn in an increasingly connected global and digital society.
Trends, infographics and some stats
#ictinhed The stats for internet penetration in Africa is here http://t.co/NywJscApn5
This ninth edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education. Six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, as well as key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning.